


How We Do This

by CurrieBelle



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-04-22
Packaged: 2018-06-03 17:22:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6619585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurrieBelle/pseuds/CurrieBelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I missed the 50th episode art gallery, so the least I can do is write something. Just Vox Machina, fighting like a family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How We Do This

When they fight, Keyleth finds her eyes on Grog, because he's loud, reckless, and hard  _not_ to look at. He's big and grey and solid, like the battlements of a castle, and he weathers arrows and acid and spears mostly by baring his teeth and getting even  _angrier_. His weapons are massive as siege machines: hammers made for demolishing walls, swords long enough to cut trees. When the fighting is done, she tells him  _good job, Grog,_ and gives him little slaps on the biceps (that's as high as she can reach without stretching) or rounds of applause, if they're too far apart. She likes to encourage him, and she loves to watch him win, because she thinks Grog needs more help than he lets on. Keyleth reasons that someone so big must have even bigger fears. She's right: when the dragons descend on Eman, he flees with the rest of Vox Machina. She sees the terror behind his rage - the panic with which he pleads for them to use the skull, the desperate faith he puts in things he doesn't understand, the lost look in his wild eyes. Keyleth tears open a portal through the tree, thinking,  _you don't need to be scared, Grog. I'll take care of you._

Grog's rarely in his right mind when they fight. When he is, Scanlan draws his attention. There's just something fucking awesome about tiny Scanlan Shorthalt summoning great big shining purple hands out of nothing. He plays music and people die! Fuckin' unbelievable. And Grog loves having music when he fights. Makes him giddy, turns big deadly vampire duels into tavern brawls, yeah? And everything hurts less when Grog is raging, and with the dulled pain and the magic-music sometimes it seems like they're all immortal, together, and their enemies are paper waiting to be shredded, so - so nothing is worse for Grog than when Scanlan falls, when that loud voice goes quiet. Rimefang spears Scanlan with a single claw, slaps him against the ice with a limp, wet noise like a sodden towel. Scanlan Shorthalt can fit in the palm of Grog's fuckin' hand, and for a second his rage is not at the dragon itself, but at the very idea that someone like Scanlan could die one day. He rushes to his side and douses him with a potion, thinking, _don't worry, little guy! I'll take care of you._

Scanlan always watches Pike, of course. His precious angel of Sarenrae! She may have a pretty porcelain-doll face, and sweet, pale-blonde hair that shimmers and bounces like sunshine, but make no mistake his Pike has _teeth_! Her hand motions when she calls down divine fire are swift, abrupt, and full of passion! When she heals them, her gleaming sapphire eyes nearly fill with the tears of a true, tender heart! When she swings her mace, there is not a single extra flourish - just pure holy-shit righteous energy! He dresses up everything in words like that. It's what bards do. Bards are flashes of noise and colour - distractions, firecrackers, putting the  _trick_ back in magic trick _._  Pike's magic is something else, something that feels real and sacred. He is not a religious gnome but Pike calls light to the darkest corners of the world, and that's something worth believing in. She came back from death once, and that's something worth believing in. But she's not going to die again. Hell no. True love aside, Pike is...important. And every time he saves her with his last-minute tricks, he thinks, with his little heart racing a little too fast,  _not again, sweetheart - this time I'll take care of you._

Pike watches Vex. She thinks more of Vox Machina should watch Vex, and more often. She fights with desperate haste, pulling her bowstring almost too hard, her incantations spilling out from her lips so fast that she stumbles over them. Pike watches her fight and can almost hear her heart racing. What the rest of her friends don't realize that Vex carries them all, in one way or another. She pulls Percy out of the dark, and she makes Keyleth feel brave. She can even rein in Grog's rages, or Scanlan's unsavoury impulses, and she is the unwavering force that keeps her troubled brother stable. Pike would worry about her friends if Vex wasn't there to take care of them. She worries about them anyway, and she's pulled muscles in her neck from looking over her shoulder to make sure they are all following, all intact. When she looks back like that, she always sees Vex counting heads. She looks from her brother, to Percy, to Keyleth, to Grog, to Scanlan, back to her brother, and then to Pike. Across the battlefield, over the cacophony, Pike wants to call back,  _you don't have to take care of everyone, Vex - I'll take care of you._

Vex watches Percy - because he's conveniently close, because they sit back together at range. To the untrained eye, Percy moves with the precision of a machine. He shoots in time with his steps, reloads without looking, all clicks and clatters and bangs, projecting cool-eyed disinterest in every fallen foe. Even when his guns break, he'll throw out a rhythmic curse and then fix the gears with angrily efficient flicks of his wrist. But she looks closer. She looks when the smoke spills out from his mouth and when the casings roll, glittering, around his feet, after the blood has been dashed across the walls, and she sees a wounded, frantic look in him. He fights scared, and he fights in pain. She sees him facing the Briarwoods alone on the steps of the Ziggurat, and she knows how terrified he is. He looks too small below her, too vulnerable. Percy has always believed himself to be alone, and he _needs_ to know that he isn't. She sends holy arrows down on the Briarwoods like a vengeful god's seething rain, and begs him in her panicked heart,  _run, Percy, please, run. I'll take care of you._

Percy watches Vax through the scope of Bad News, usually with a frustrated huff, as the rogue seems to get in the way of every clear shot, gods-damn it. Vax is _such_ a disaster, skittering on ahead in the dark, fighting like his daggers are always a breath away from slipping out of his hands, running like he's losing his balance. And he is! He falls and falls often: he passes out from blood loss or overexertion or one too many blunt-force-strikes to the temple. And yet - and yet, Vax is somehow so  _certain._ He strikes from the dark, he aims for weak points, he fights dirty and unfair, he kills suddenly and precisely...and yet there is an enviable conviction in his risk-taking. He  _will_ protect, save, kill if necessary. Percy has spent so long hiding, and even longer thinking, and even longer stammering out justifications for what he's done. And he hopes to learn what conviction is - maybe even what being a  _hero_ is - from Vax, one day. Until then, he watches Vax get cut down a dozen times, and blows the heads off anything that gets too close to him while Pike rushes forwards to heal him. All the while, Percy is thinking,  _if you won't take care of yourself, idiot, I'll take care of you._

Vax watches Keyleth burst into flame, vivid, burning, a landed star, and his whole body tenses with fearful awe. How is it possible that someone so small and gentle as Keyleth - how could she carry tides and tornadoes and earthquakes inside her little frame? The whole world pulses through her, and when he touches her hand the heat is volcanic, and she should be too much for this fragile earth to support. He watches her and forgets to be afraid, and sometimes forgets to be careful - well, when is he ever careful? But his awe is all because this earth-shattering creature is still, somehow, _Keyleth_. She is gentle and she is sublime, all at once. She smiles like a child, and she cries like one as well. He marvels that all the shifting fortunes and forces of the world cannot scar Keyleth's heart, that she still believes in good and fights for it, and that is what makes her more precious than anything. That is what makes him beg for her company that night. That is why he folds her infinitely mighty frame in his astoundingly normal arms and whispers, _sleep, now. I'll take care of you._


End file.
